Rihanna's tour de farce

Last year, Rihanna packed a plane with eager journalists and lucky fans for a week-long world tour, promising unprecedented access to her whirlwind life and front-row seats to her sold-out shows. But the reality — airport hell, S&M clubs and far too much tequila — was very different, says a broken Craig McLean

Rihanna's tour de farce

Rihanna's tour de farce

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Rihanna boarding the plane in LA

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Australian DJ Tim Dormer streaking on the plane

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Rihanna joins the crew in the cockpit

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Craig McLean (far left) and his fellow travellers set off from LA

Saturday night in Paris, well past the bitching hour, and I was submitting to a spanking in a sex dungeon nightclub. Anything to relieve the boredom. No, wait, it was Friday. And maybe it was in Stockholm. Such were the already disorientating effects of Rihanna’s 777 tour: a whistle-stop run of seven gigs in seven cities in seven days that the superstar was undertaking to promote Unapologetic, her seventh album in as many years. Accompanying her were 150 repre-sentatives of the world’s media and 150 competition-winning members of her fan club. What could possibly go wrong?

As the Rihanna concert experience prepares to touch down at Twickenham next month, the mile-high infamy of 777 has already gone down in pop-culture lore as the biggest publicity fiasco in history — a catastrophically shambolic, chronically tardy promotional misstep. But since she has sold 30 million albums and 120 million singles in eight years, who really cares when she comes on stage 153 minutes late? Given that she was reportedly three hours late on stage again, in Boston last week, she clearly hasn’t listened to the fan in Berlin, who shouted: ‘Get a watch, bitch!’

An event of this magnitude deserves recording and so now comes an official 777 documentary (it is, naturally, 77 minutes and seven seconds long, crunched down from 300 hours of footage). Quite a feat for a tour that only lasted 168 hours.

But let’s start at take-off, back in November last year. I had been invited aboard Rihanna’s specially chartered private plane to document what sounded like the greatest PR wheeze ever. Admittedly, there were no firm promises of one-on-one pow-wows. But there would be daily press conferences. And we were flying in the diva’s company for a whole week — at some point she was bound to talk to the hacks, right?

Wrong. By the time we’d touched down in Stockholm, only two days in, the wheels had fallen off. The schedule was torpedoed the minute we’d left the start line, a Los Angeles hotel, when the buses drove us to the wrong airport terminal. Already we were lost and late, one mile into our odyssey. Only 11,308 to go. Slow-forward to Sweden, our third country in as many days. I had barely slept a few hours, and eyeballed the lady herself for considerably fewer. At that night’s show, Rihanna came on stage two and a half hours late. The after-show party was being held in a club directly underneath the venue so, really, there was no reason for further delays. But as we already knew to our knackered, hungry, inebriated cost, time-keeping is not one of RiRi’s strong suits.

That’s how I came to avail myself of the distractions of the Snizz & Snatch subterranean discotheque. The club’s en-suite, have-a-go S&M cubbyhole and bookstore sold pervy paddles, collars and cuffs, as well as books with titles such as The Mistress Manual: The Good Girl’s Guide to Female Dominance. A couple of metres away, behind some record decks above the dancefloor, was a VVIP bar, open only to extra-special guests of Rihanna. Beyond the probably electrified velvet rope, scantily clad hostesses were dispensing tequila shots with machine-gun efficiency.

All things considered, it was a very Rihanna spot. Sometime around 4am, the lady herself finally appeared, splashing the Patrón willy-nilly. But I’d already had enough. That’s what the Twitter-trending phenom #777 — aka #freetheRihanna150 — had done to me: crushed my love for RiRi. I’d sloped off wearily to bed, my throbbing bottom the least of my worries. I had a plane to catch. In, like, ten minutes.

As well as no sleep, there were no interviews, not even a press conference. In this bleary, gossipy void, we self-medicated with booze and rumours: Kanye West was coming to the Stockholm gig, hence the sudden run on the guest list; Rihanna went AWOL in Berlin because she was hanging with Chris Brown; a fan had shagged a member of her band (twice); two journalists from Sweden were punched by a security guard; we were stuck for hours on the Tarmac in Paris because Rihanna had gone underwear shopping; Jay-Z was joining her on stage for the final show in New York. At least three of those are true (the shagging, punching, shopping and, possibly, ‘hanging’).

At certain low points — for example, the ten hours it took to travel from Stockholm to Paris — I idly wondered how things would have gone if Rihanna had undertaken this jumbo-jet jolly the previous year, for her sixth album, Talk That Talk. Would the 666 tour have been any less hellish?

Last week, six months on, I attended the screening of the documentary Rihanna 777 at a private cinema in Shoreditch with fellow British members of the Rihanna 777 Survivors Group. There were 12 embedded UK hacks. I knew two of them before take-off; now I know all of them more intimately than my own children. We have been through hell — the world’s worst traffic jam in Mexico City; a freezing, pre-dawn stranding on the Tarmac at Stansted — and more bottles of life-saving tequila than the Magnificent Seven. Our Deadly Dozen have already had two Ri-unions.

So we settled down to revisit the seven days that changed our lives. As the woman from Grazia astutely noted, we sat in the same positions we’d had on the plane. This only amplified the feeling that we’d been unwitting participants in a mad psychological experiment hatched by Rihanna’s all-powerful American management Roc Nation (owned by Jay-Z). Yawning uncontrollably while watching the images of countless buses and innumerable airport terminals, I could only agree. We were all Pavlov’s dormice.

As the documentary unspooled the memories juddered back. Unsurprisingly, it offered a sanitised view. Not pictured: those bowel-busting longueurs on stationary buses, nor the catatonic horror of being trapped in a deserted wee-hours departure hall; the rumblings of dissent from the lucky American superfans who couldn’t believe they were flying round the world with Rihanna and seeing next to nothing of her.

We collectively hooted at the hilarious contributions of larger-than-life Australian media celeb Tim Dormer. A toothsome DJ with Sideshow Bob hair, he streaked up and down the aisle during the Berlin-London leg, a tension-releasing outburst after five days of escalating misery. Dormer’s nudity was the catalyst for a hugely entertaining, pre-dawn, inflight mini-mutiny that climaxed with the world’s media, desperate with deadlines and drunkenness, banging their tray tables and chanting, viz: ‘Just one quote!’ ‘Save our jobs!’ ‘We have weed!’

But there were sweeter memories, too, notably the musical segments from the seven gigs. You can’t deny the 25-year-old’s hit-making genius: matchless, precision-tooled, electro-R&B anthems all. And so it had been during the tour. The Bajan queen with the great pipes’n’pins may have traumatised us all week long by keeping us waiting (and waiting) and refusing to engage with us, but every night, when she swaggered on stage and turned on that mic, we forgave her, and shouted, clapped and danced.

Call it Stockholm syndrome. But we kept going back for more. And when Rihanna finally did deign to walk-and-talk among us — as the plane descended for the last time, into New York — the outpouring of affection was palpable. ‘This has been an experience every day,’ she said, accurately. ‘I didn’t get to spend as much time as I would have liked with you guys. Thank you everybody for making this trip the shit, honestly.’ No, thank you, Queen RiRi. ‘I would do this again, but I’d sit back here so I can see the naked Australian next time.’

The high point? The New York show, when she gifted us a dazzling party gig, complete with confetti cannon and end-of-term, free-at-last, we-can-go-home-now exuberance. The low point? The Paris show, when, befuddled with fatigue and booze, I walked into a pillar, then apologised to it.

Will I watch the Rihanna 777 tour documentary again? Probably not. Does Rihanna come out looking bad? Hell no. She’s a proper pop-punk badass who (to paraphrase her ever-engaging Twitter feed) genuinely doesn’t give a ‘phuck’, even when she has 150 rabid media and 150 ardent fans breathing down her neck 24/7. We shouldn’t have been surprised; she told us she was unapologetic. Will I be at Twickenham in June? Damn straight. Wouldn’t miss RiRi for anything. She’s the only girl in the world, right? ES